Wednesday, January 30, 2008

A SENIOR United Nations official has been accused of endorsing anti-Semitism - 'UNHRC endorsed anti-Semitic charter'. The charge of racism is made by UN Watch in a complaint about of the endorsement of the Arab Charter on Human Rights which includes phrases such as "rejecting all forms of racism and Zionism, which constitute a violation of human rights and a threat to international peace and security," as well as "all forms of racism, Zionism and foreign occupation and domination constitute an impediment to human dignity... all such practices must be condemned and efforts must be deployed for their elimination."

UN Watch wants UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to clarify her recent endorsement of the charter which it says is itself racist.

"Zionism is the movement for Jewish self-determination and asserts the inherent and internationally-acknowledged right of Israel to exist," it says.

"A text that equates Zionism with racism, describes it as a threat to world peace, as an enemy of human rights and human dignity, and then urges its elimination, is blatantly anti-Semitic.

"Even if the Arab Charter may contain other, constructive provisions, nothing can justify any endorsement of a text with such hateful language," it states.

This is the latest in a series of controversies involving clear cut instances of bias against Israel from UN bodies such as the heavily stacked UN Human Rights Council (dominated by Muslim nations bent on attacking the Jewish State when it defends its citizens against Palestinian terrorism while avoiding far more serious human rights issues including the atrocities committed by Arab militias in Sudan) and the UN refugee agency UNWRA, a major employer of Palestinians (including terrorists) in Gaza. Most of these problems stem from blatant animus against the Jewish State although there are also some obvious cases of ignorance starting at the top where to the astonishment of many observers, even United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demonstrated last week that he was seemingly unaware of Egypt's involvement in the blockade.

The head of UNWRA in Gaza, John Ging, has been quoted by apologists for the illegal Hamas regime in Gaza in support of that group's shameful theatrics and manipulation of the events from the region - The Apologists. UNWRA has in the past been exposed for employing members of Hamas - Terror on the UN Payroll?

We often see members of the media with anti-Israel agendas picking up some of the most outrageously dishonest interpretations of the law and publishing them as fact and without challenge. As a result the United Nations has allowed itself to be used by those who willingly manipulate events for their own propaganda purposes - Special Report: The Hamas Propaganda War.

The tragedy is that the United Nations has allowed itself to become a player in a process that is speeding the Palestinians on a trip to nowhere.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

I was sitting in a St. Kilda cafe on a sunny afternoon on the Monday Australia Day holiday and I overheard a group who were drinking their coffee and discussing some articles in yesterday's Melbourne Age. I was surprised that they were discussing the Middle East and in particular two separate opinion pieces on the situation in Gaza and even more surprised that they had reached a consensus that Hamas and the terrorist organisations should be held in contempt for the plight of the Palestinians.

I've cancelled my subscription to the Age and generally access it only through the online Age. Somehow, I had missed the two opinion pieces published on the subject. First, an article by Professor Fania Oz-Salzberger (chairman of modern Israel studies at Monash University) - No easy solution while Hamas keeps warring. The other was written by the public advocate for Australians for Palestine Michael Shaik - Palestinians suffer as the world fails Gaza.

I managed to read both but one of the women at the neighbouring table, an artist who incidentally is not Jewish, summed up both articles quite succinctly. She described the Professor's article as "a call for peace" and the AFP item, "a hateful cry for vengeance".

Monday, January 28, 2008

The brief article on the death of Palestinian terrorist George Habash in today's Melbourne Age carries the title "Fighter for Palestine dies". Typically, the details of his life remain in the blank pages although, in a rare concession to honest reporting, the item admits that he "gained notoriety for promoting the Palestinian cause through terrorist attacks".

Which is what terrorist groups Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad do these days except they're now called "militants" and some members of the media cover up for a most of what they do and what they stand for.

In the real world Habash was a nasty piece of work, a real mass murderer. He was much more than a "party founder" as the headline to this item in USA Today states - he "promoted the Palestinian cause through terrorist attacks in the 1970s, including the hijacking of an Air France airliner to Entebbe, Uganda. The group also was responsible for gunning down 27 people at Israel's Lod airport in May 1972."

The report in the Age provides a little bit of understanding as to why Israel is forced to take its counter measures to terrorist activity emanating from places like Gaza which cause such dismay among Fairfax letter writers. It leaves me to wonder however, whether the Age headline on 1 May 1945 read "Fighter for Germany dies". In any event, Habash has departed and he doesn't have to fear being skyjacked on his way to his next destination because, like all of his ilk, he's headed down all the way to hell.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

This could have been written last week but what I have to say is better said today because today is Holocaust Memorial Day.

On Tuesday 22 January 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald published a shocking libel against the Jews and all those who suffered under the inhumanity of the Nazi jackboot. It took the form of a letter from a correspondent (Zaid Khan) who made the direct comparison between conditions for the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and those of the Palestinians in Gaza under the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.

A number of readers were stunned and offended by the paper's lapse in judgement in publishing of such a scurrilous claim but the SMH ignored them and published a single brief response (Slight Difference) the following day. Peter Wertheim's Immoral Equivalence and this Washington Post editorial substantively answer the first letter, expose the dangers inherent to the region and the world that are posed by the unchallenged acceptance of the big lie and explain why Fairfax should have exercised some discretion over its publication in the first place.

Fairfax should have known better because the SMH offended on this exact subject before and, after a complaint was lodged with the Australian Press Council in 2003 about a Moir cartoon, apologised for what was termed a "self-confessed lapse in judgement". A year earlier, Michael Gawenda then editor of the SMH sister newspaper in Melbourne - the Age - recognised how deeply offensive such false equivalence can be to the public and refused to publish a similarly tasteless cartoon from resident scrawler Leunig.

But apparently Fairfax won't learn from its mistakes. On Thursday 24 January 2008 it crossed the divide and became more than just the publisher of a letter from a reader with an axe to grind. It joined the campaign against the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust and against the Jewish State which has to contend with official Palestinian groups that threaten more of the same with a flood of correspondence all in agreement with the sentiments of the first letter.

This was a clear case of overkill - even from a news group that makes no pretence to the side on which its preferences lie - and it was particularly nasty. In the words of an ICJS correspondent, it "compounded the horror of the initial blood libel against the Jewish people" The SMH did so by publishing "five different letters all on the same theme claiming that the Jews of Warsaw would have acted as the terrorists (i.e. murdered German and Polish civilians) if they had the opportunity. In other words, in the week before Holocaust Memorial Day, Fairfax allowed the pages of its own newspaper to air the sort of material that gave rise to the atrocities of Holocaust in the first place."

The ICJS correspondent added "for the sake of the victims, we cannot accept this deplorable behaviour from what is supposed to be one of the country's leading media groups."

The following article appears on the ICJS* website and articulates many of the reasons for and the depth of the offence caused by the publication this week in the Sydney Morning Herald of noxious correspondence comparing the treatment of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza.

A spate of letters appeared this week in the Sydney Morning Herald comparing Israel's measures aimed at stopping rockets and mortars from being fired into Israel from Gaza to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Although the Herald received numerous letters debunking the analogy, it published only one of them. This is the second time the Herald has lapsed into cheap moral relativism over the Nazi Holocaust. It was given a rap over the knuckles by the Press Council in 2003 for publishing a cartoon making a similar analogy. At the time, the Herald published an apology for its "lapse of judgement" and promised not to do it again. It has clearly reneged on that promise.

Let's be very clear about this. The Nazis were openly and explicitly committed to "the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe", that is murdering or forcibly expelling every last Jew from Europe. This was unashamedly a program for genocide, and it lay at the core of Nazi ideology and practice. It had no ulterior motive. It WAS the ulterior motive. This was not because of anything Jews had done, but purely because Jews were said (falsely) to be of a different race. Even though Jews had been persecuted in Europe for centuries, Jews did not launch rocket attacks against European towns and cities or blow themselves up in European shopping centres, trams and restaurants or teach their kindergarten-aged children to hate and kill their non-Jewish neighbours. Nevertheless Jews were herded into ghettos (Warsaw was only one of many), packed on to cattle cars and transported by train to purpose-built death camps where they were systematically gassed to death and their bodies cremated. All this because of their (supposed) race. No other reason.

For the last 60 years Israel has been facing precisely the same threat that the Jews of Europe faced in the 1930's and 1940's. For Hamas, Hezbollah etc, most Jews are to be killed or forcibly expelled and the Middle East is to come under exclusively Arab and Islamic sovereignty, even though the recorded history of the region is not exclusively (or even predominantly)Arab and Islamic. On the question of the ultimate intentions of Israel's enemies, don't take my word for it. Let Hamas, Hezbollah etc speak for themselves. Read, for example, the Hamas Charter, if you can stomach it. An excellent English language translation prepared by YaleUniversity can be accessed at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm. Have a look for example at Article 7. No intellectually honest person can come away from a reading of that document without concluding that it is a Charter for racism, a program for genocide. Hamas is openly and explicitly committed to a 'final solution to the Jewish question' in the Middle East that is no different to Hitler's final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.

Indeed, just as the Nazis, at the expense of their own people and army, diverted valuable resources at the end of World War II in order to kill more Jews, so too Hamas diverts diesel from its own people to use as fuel to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. Hamas has even targeted power stations in Israel that continue to supply 60% of Gaza's electricity, and then accuses Israel of depriving Palestinians of electricity!

The difference today is that Jews are no longer defenceless in the face of these genocidal assaults. But when Israel fulfils its obligation to defend its citizens from rocket and mortar attacks and homicide bombings that are intentionally aimed at Israel's civilian population centres, people like the anti-Israel hate squad who regularly mar the letters pages of the Herald cry foul. It's easy for them - living half a world a way in the safety and comfort of Australia - to criticise Israel. But if they were Israeli civilians facing people who are maniacally committed to killing them and their children for racial and religious reasons they might have a different perspective. They never say what they would do.

Remember, Israel has been committed to a two-State solution with the Palestinians since 1947 when the UN General Assembly first voted for a two-State solution. It was the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership, not the Jewish people, who openly declared war on the UN partition plan and illegally used force as a first resort to oppose it. It was thus the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership, not the Jewish people, who started the civil war in November 1947 which began the Palestinian exodus. It was the armies of 5 Arab states who invaded the country in 1948 and accelerated the Palestinian exodus. And it was Jordan and Egypt, not Israel, which gobbled up most of the territory allocated by the UN to the Palestinians.

So the 'Gaza is Warsaw' historical analogy falls flat on its face for 3 reasons.

(1) It's Hamas and Hezbollah, not Israel, which share the genocidal program of the Nazis - and against the same target. Their attacks have provoked the restrictions Israel has applied to Gaza, not the other way round. Israel does not impose such restrictions for the fun of it.

(2) The measures taken by Israel are in self-defence against repeated attacks against their civilians by an enemy openly bent on genocide. Nobody ever argued that the Nazis acted in self-defence against Jewish attacks, because there weren't any.

(3) The measures taken by Israel may seem harsh, but it is obscene to compare them to what the Nazis did. Not unless you can point to an example of Palestinians being packed on to cattle cars and transported by train to purpose-built death camps where they are systematically gassed to death and their bodies cremated.

Peter Wertheim AM is a former President of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and a current board member of the NSW Anti Discrimination Board.

* "Issues of Concern for Justice & Society (ICJS) was formed to express the concerns of Australian citizens about a broad range of issues such as terrorism, appeasement, tolerance, war and justice in society. We note that these issues are not debated in the media, and where they are dealt with it is often done in an imbalanced manner. We struggle to redress imbalance in the media."

This is how the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the outcome of a complaint by a reader concerning the publication of a hideous anti-Semitic cartoon by Moir. The decision did not prevent SMH from repeating the same grave error last week when it published a series of offensive and racist letters drawing the same immoral equivalence:-

Press Council upholds complaint

November 17, 2003

The Australian Press Council has upheld in part a complaint by Nathan Potaznik concerning the publication by The Sydney Morning Herald of a cartoon by Moir that juxtaposed images of the Warsaw Ghetto and the wall being built by Israel on the West Bank.

The council is satisfied, however, that the actions taken by the Herald in response to criticism of the cartoon constitute an adequate apology for its self-confessed "lapse of judgement".

On August 12, 2003 the Herald published the Moir cartoon captioned "The road to peace". It comprised two separate images of roads blocked by walls - a wall labelled "Warsaw 1943", and a wall labelled "West Bank 2003".

Mr Potaznik argued that the publication of the cartoon breached several of the council's principles. He complained that the comparison of the two walls was false, and a vicious and racist distortion; that the representation lacked fairness and honesty; that it disregarded the sensibilities of readers; and that it placed gratuitous emphasis on the Jewish people.

Response to the cartoon from readers was swift, and the following day the Heraldpublished several letters under the headline "Offensive to compare Warsaw ghetto with West Bank". On August 14, further letters were published, along with an article about the West Bank wall by David Knoll of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

On August 16, the Herald's editor took the unusual step of using the Postscript column on the letters page to acknowledge the paper's "lapse of judgement" and to apologise for the offence caused by the cartoon.

Mr Potaznik considered that the paper's apology for offending many readers was insufficient. He said it should also have retracted, and apologised for, the "egregious factual errors" underlying what he saw as the cartoon's implication, via reference to the Warsaw Ghetto, that the West Bank wall had been erected with a view to enclosing, and ultimately exterminating, the Palestinians.

The council has consistently taken the view that cartoonists should have considerable freedom to comment on events, and that exaggeration and caricature are legitimate vehicles for conveying their message.

This does not imply unfettered licence to be inaccurate or seriously offensive, and cartoonists, like writers, must be accountable for what they produce. Where lapses and errors occur, correction and apology is the appropriate course of action.

The council agrees that the cartoon was so offensive as to breach its principles and, to that extent alone, upholds the complaint.

The council is satisfied, however, that the space and prominence given to criticism of the cartoon, the publication of a balancing article on the West Bank wall, and the prominent apology by the editor adequately discharges the Herald's responsibilities to publicly admit its failure to meet appropriate ethical and journalistic standards on this occasion.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Osama Dhubilfalt, 21, sat pensively watching as workmen feverishly laboured to repair the rammed ant bed tennis court sitting between his ramshackle home in embattled Rafah on the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt. "The Zionist occupiers only won a grand slam title because their racist military machine destroyed the only tennis court I can practice on. Otherwise I would have won," he said.

On Saturday, Israel's Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram won their first grand slam title with a 7-5 7-6 victory over Frenchmen Arnaud Clement and Michael Llodra in the Australian Open men's doubles final.

They became the first Israeli pair to win a grand slam title but the victory was overshadowed by the accusation that the Jewish State's armed forces had conspired to preventDhubilfalt, the highest ranked Palestinian tennis player at 734, from completing the arduous training requirements necessary for entry into a grand slam tennis tournament.

"First the Israelis prevented me from training at nights by blockading fuel supplies so there was no ordinary diesel left to run the generator that operated the court’s lights. I have to train at night because I work at the local foundry making metal pipes," Dhubilfalt said as his brother Khalid arrived in the family truck laden with supplies of television sets, computers, cartons of Marlboro and two dozen bags of fertilizer after taking advantage of a rare opportunity to leave their de facto prison and crossing into Egypt to purchase some much needed supplies for the starving Dhubilfalt family.

"Then I arrived home one evening and the Zionists had blown up my court. The same bombs that destroyed my tennis court killed women and children in the house down the street and destroyed the local church a few blocks away."

A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry denied his country’s armed forces were operating in the area and attributed the damage to the tennis court to the collapse of a tunnel that had been dug by militants to smuggle arms for attacks on Israeli civilians.

"The allegation that we sabotaged the Rafah tennis court to prevent Dhubilfalt from pursuing his tennis career and to guarantee the Israeli pair a grand slam title is absurd. Dhubilfalt hasn’t even won a game in a satellite tournament yet and he doesn’t even have a doubles partner”.

"That suggestion is absurd," said Sarah Hambone, a spokeswoman for Oxfart. “Dhubilfalt’s brother Khalid would have made an excellent doubles partner but the Israelis refused to allow him to cross the border for vital surgery to repair his tennis elbow. The only reason the Israeli border authorities gave for the refusal was that he was under suspicion of supplying pipe shaped quassam missile launchers for Gaza militants. “

"Khalid also refused to remove his belt which was bulging over his stomach. Such is the humiliation that Palestinians face every day at the hands of the apartheid Zionist authorities," she added.

How refreshing is it to go to a Fairfax news internet site and read an item about the State of Israel and one of its citizens and for there not to be even the slightest hint of the author editorialising or ramming his own opinions down the reader's throat?

This is the exact experience I had this morning when I read Jason Koutsoukis' excellent piece in the Melbourne Age about Aussie expat Mark Regev who has risen to the post of official spokesman for Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - The (Aussie) voice of Israel. Regev is here on a personal visit.

What resonates through the Koutsoukis article is how Regev, who is spokesman for an unpopular leader as a result of criticism at home of Olmert’s handling of the Second Lebanon War of 2006, is able to talk about his homeland and of his hopes for peace with his country's neighbours and there is not even a hint of the hatred that so manifestly fills the other side as painted in so many of the Fairfax reports from the region.

"Canada will not take part in a major United Nations conference on racism next year because the event is likely to descend into 'regrettable anti-Semitism', a top official said".

The disgusting events of Durban were overshadowed a week after the hatefest ended by the massacre at the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 when the world bore witness to what happens when real hatred is tolerated. On that morning, free thinking people in the world realised that they were all like the Israelis who faced hatred and deception on a daily basis.

If the world is to be truly free of the scourge of racism, it needs more of its leaders to follow Canada's lead and to shun the hatemongers.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Thankfully, we no longer need to endure the babble from the dupes in the Hamasphere about Gaza being under siege by Israel. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has "proved to the world that his country is perfectly capable of caring for the Palestinians when it comes to food and medical care".

The BBC commentator described the scene as thousands of Gaza residents swarmed into Egypt (yes, Gaza has a border with Egypt even though the media has been suggesting for months that it is surrounded and blockaded by Israel alone) after the border fence was blasted away by militants overnight as "people power" and it truly was exactly that - the Palestinian version of "people power" meticulously planned and co-ordinated in every detail and pulled off with the help of supporters in the media. Welcome to "people power" in the Hamasphere!

McClatchy News correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has explained the entire border breach scenario had been meticulously planned for weeks. That it was worked in conjunction with all of the other media theatre antics we've seen in recent weeks is evidence that the scenes on the border were not a spontaneous display of "people power" as we know it anywhere else in the world. It was something far more sinister.

The crisis that spurred the border scenes is supposed to be based on humanitarian issues but what sort of people complain that they have no money, no food and no manufacturing power and yet have an abundant supply of explosives on hand to blow up border walls in up to 17 places, to manufacture missiles and rockets in factories (where the power supply is uninterrupted while the authorities shut down the power to hospitals and bakeries) and for those missiles to be fired at civilian targets across the border into neighbouring Israel?

Two days ago when Hamas authorities stage-managed Gaza's "plunge into darkness" for its media dupes, the BBC World News showed footage of a Gaza woman asking in a pleading voice, "why don't they leave us alone?"

A good question but the person who should have been asking it was a woman in Israel's Sderot which has been under a barrage of daily missile fire from Palestinian terrorist groups for years.

If they left her alone, then the woman in Gaza would be free to buy her bread any day of the week.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

"Noteworthy is the fact that while the Gaza population remains in the dark, the fuel generating power to the Hamas rocket manufacturing industry continues to flow unabated." - Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Yesterday, External Relations European Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said: "I condemn the rocket fire into Israel and we fully understand Israel's need to defend its citizens." But she also accused Israel of causing "blackouts in parts of Gaza, affecting both homes and hospitals. Closing the crossings will also result in shortages of food, medical and relief items ... I am against this collective punishment of the people of Gaza."

It would be nice if the international press and the governments that blindly took their cues from it would take a moment to consider that their Pavlovian embrace of the manufactured "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza could lead, at best, to prolonging the suffering of Gazans and Israelis and, at worst, to full blown war. The reason for this is that anything that reduces the pressure on Hamas to end its unprovoked aggression against Israel will encourage that aggression, with all its associated results.

....

It is one thing for Hamas to have decided to attack Israel without any justification, to the detriment of the people it claims to represent. But why would nations that claim to be concerned for Palestinians, Israelis and for peace chime in to reinforce the transparent ploy by Hamas to blame Israel for having been attacked?

Perhaps more European officials should visit Sderot before opening their mouths. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen did just that, and had this to say: "Hamas is deliberately intensifying the crisis in the Gaza Strip in order to create pressure from the international community on Israel." The international community need not play Hamas's game. If Western officials uniformly blamed Hamas instead of amplifying its propaganda, it might be forced to stop its aggression, ending the "humanitarian crisis." As necessary as Israeli military and non-military measures are, the greatest pressure of all would be if the international community let it be clearly known that it was fed up acting as Hamas's dupes.

This sums up clearly how Hamas and its dupes are damaging the cause of a just peace settlement. We know that Palestinians must be given less cause to see Israelis as the enemy and more reason to hope - that is what the meeting at Annapolis in Maryland was all about. However, as we have seen time and time again Hamas is committed to armed struggle against Israel and the more free rein its dupes are given to enable it to push its deadly cause, the more delayed is the day when Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

"We are the only country in the world where every morning the consumer points rockets towards the power station providing him with electricity." - Israel's National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer denying claims that Israel halted its supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip [Infrastructure minister: We will continue to supply Gaza with power]

[Pictured above - Israeli victims of the daily barrages of rockets fired by Palestinian terrorists into Israel which go largely unreported by certain segments of the mainstream media]

"The jihadists of Gaza fire rockets into Israel's Ashkelon power station day and night for months, aiming to knock it out. They do this even though the same plant is the source of most of their (Gazan) electricity. Finally after months of this appalling terrorist warfare, Israel says 'enough'. It doesn't stop supplying power to Gaza but it cuts back on fuel supplies to the Strip. The jihadist Hamas regime then shuts down its own small power station, plunging the entire area into darkness, announces that babies are dying because of the absence of power, and cries to the world that the Israelis did it." Electric wars - a sad tale of two realities. Israel's attempts to avoid responsibility for blacking out Gaza City.

The BBC World News fell for this latest piece of Palestinian PR hook, line and sinker and it even happened to have a reporter in place and conducting an interview for the dramatic Pallywood moment when the lights went out. The scene was stage managed better than some of the melodramas that have been coming out of the BBC lately.

Predictably, the Melbourne Age fallen into line on cue today with UN points finger at Israel over Gaza blackout [aka unofficial press release by the newspaper of the Southern Hamasphere]. The source for the nonsensical claim that Israel was attempting to avoid responsibility for blacking out Gaza City was a "senior official of the UN refugee agency UNRWA". The same UNWRA which has in the past been exposed for employing members of Hamas - Terror on the UN Payroll?. The UNWRA official would of course know better than the people who actually supply the fuel (and who can quote details of supply to a fraction of a megawatt) and whose employees risk their lives under terrorist rocket attacks to deliver it.

The UNWRA man would also know better than the Israel Foreign Ministry spokesman who stated that the "supply of electricity to Gaza from the Israel and the Egyptian power grids (124 Megawatts and 17 Megawatts respectively) has continued uninterrupted. These 141 Megawatts of power represents about three quarters of Gaza's electricity needs. While the fuel supply from Israel into Gaza has indeed been reduced, due to the Hamas rocket attacks, the diversion of this fuel from domestic power generators to other uses is wholly a Hamas decision - apparently taken due to media and propaganda considerations".

Perhaps the UNWRA man can also point to one other country which has, in the history of wars, provided more energy supplies and humanitarian supplies to an enemy dedicated to wiping it off the face of the earth than Israel has for the Palestinians?

Is that the best that the Fairfax apologist for the thug master terrorists who are destroying Gaza, its people and the prospects for peace with its neighbour can do?

POSTSCRIPT: Now the Palestine Press Agency is reporting that Hamas is forcing bakeries in Gaza to close - even though they have enough supplies to stay open for a month (autotranslated, and cleaned up by Elder of Ziyon).

In other words, here is confirmation from a Palestinian newsagency corroborating Israel's claim that Hamas is orchestrating a massive propaganda fraud with the assistance of friends within the media. As Elder of Ziyon points out "this story in particular is consistent with how we have seen Hamas act in the past, as well as earlier reports that Hamas has confiscated fuel meant for hospitals for its own use."

Monday, January 21, 2008

Gaza City plunged into darkness, Hamas leaders calling for help, it's a grave humanitarian crisis and all part of a Zionist crime - that's what the thug masters of Gaza are bleating about at the moment - Hamas leader asks for Gaza Strip help.

The truth is something else altogether but the media supporters of Gaza's thug masters will busily put together their spin about the suffering of the local Palestinians as if it was all the fault of those nasty Israelis. According to Ynet here's what's really happening:-

Israeli military officials say there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza; the Palestinians have enough food supply to last them for the next weeks, and that any reports of such a crisis were created and promoted by Hamas.

"While admitting that the situation in the Gaza Strip was far from good, the official rejected claims that Gazans were suffering from a power shortage due to the shutting down of turbines at the local power plant.

'Even today, Israel is behind 70% of the power supply to Gaza, and therefore any claim to the effect that there are electricity problems in Gaza is unfounded,' he stated. 'These are media spins by interested parties. We did not cut back on electricity and don't intend to do so at this point.

'The Palestinians are in fact the ones who shut down power for several hours a day in a bid to create a crisis. At the moment, their fuel supply has not run out yet. If there is shortage of fuel oil at the power plants, they should ask themselves what happened to the supply they received.'

The truth is that the lights have been turned off by Hamas. Life in Gaza has been destroyed by the Qassams - by the Hamas leadership and by the thug masters who care no more for the Palestinian people than for the Israeli civilians who they target. And those who spead the lies and spin of the thug masters also care not for either people.

I have already mentioned Greg Sheridan's excellent piece in the Australian Newspaper - DEEP INSIDE THE PLUCKY COUNTRY but I want to mention it again because I re-read the article this morning and found it to be fascinating and insightful as did this reader from San Francisco who wrote the following letter:-

Sheridan hits the nail on the head in observing that most international reporters “cover the territories and they only cover Israel as a brooding and malign presence in the territories”. The predictable result, he observes, is one-sided reporting that ignores Israel. So he counters this trend with a breathtaking survey of the tiny nation, noting Israel’s great beauty and its remarkable diversity in people, culture, geography and even flora.

He also deserves praise for putting today’s key political issues in context. For instance, he notes that the 1967 war began when “Israel was attacked by a coalition of its Arab neighbours”, and that “every day Qassam rockets are fired from Gaza at nearby Israeli civilian towns, especially Sderot”. And he expresses his hopes for peace, but laments that too many Arab and Palestinian leaders “still believe that in time they will wipe Israel off the map”.

Stephen A. Silver

San Francisco, California, US

Congratulations Mr. Silver for an inspired summation of Sheridan's writing.

[The Australian enables the posting of comments in its on line letters section so sit back and wait for the hysterical yapping of the small army of Israel bashers and anti-Semitic sickos as they froth at the mouth and compete with each other to come up with the usual array of lies to back those Arab and Palestinian leaders who still believe that in time they will wipe Israel off the map and have brought about so much pain and misery for their own people.]

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Israel's Haaretz newspaper reports that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has lashed out against Hamas accusing it of "destroying the dreams and trying to destroy the future and our national aspirations" - ABBAS ACCUSES HAMAS OF 'DESTROYING OUR NATIONAL ASPIRATIONS'. The article also quotes PA Information Minister Riyadh al-Maliki who also places the blame on Hamas for the IDF offensive in the Gaza Strip.

"The party which staged a coup against the Palestinian Authority and now rules Gaza is responsible for the condition of the Strip and the suffering of the Palestinian people there," he said.

Mr. al-Maliki wouldn't be a PA Information Minister unless he threw some barbs in the direction of Israel:-

"Hamas is responsible for the Israeli madness and the massacres the [Israeli] army carries out everyday against our people in Gaza Strip."

Massacres?

He means Israel's defence of its own citizens by targetting of members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Maliki's own Fatah movement involved in daily cross border missile attacks. Apparently, international law allows nations to defend their own people but not if they happen to be Jews.

Still, his comments show up the reports from one particular Hamas-friendly journalist in our own local media who seems to think he knows something about the conflict in the region and who won't be reporting on these PA claims any time soon. Nor will he report on this or this piece of sickness from Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah because, like Basil Fawlty, there are some things we mustn't talk about at all.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

An article by Ed O'Loughlin in today's Melbourne Age [The future at hand, set in concrete] gives the impression that the prospect of Palestinian State and the chances of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are being killed off because of Israeli settlement and security activity in the West Bank. O'Loughlin cites a claim Israeli human rights group B'tselem that at least half of the West Bank land has already been "allocated to settler or Israeli military use" and therefore there "seems to be little room left for a Palestinian state".

There are two things wrong with this statement that makes it a big lie.

Firstly, this figure of "half" of the West Bank land has been plucked from nowhere. The area of West Bank is 5,949 square kilometres (including East Jerusalem which is 70 sq. km) of which Israeli settlements cover only a small proportion. The Israeli military certainly does not use the rest of the land up to 50 per cent or almost 3,000 sq. km and it is a huge stretch for anyone in their right mind to suggest that it does. In any event, if negotiations came to fruition and a state of peace existed, there would ultimately be no need for the Israeli military to use any West Bank land.

Secondly, it is well documented that in previous talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams such as those that took place at Taba in 2001, it was accepted by both sides that the eventual borders between the two states would see the inclusion of about 3% of the West Bank in Israel proper (being the areas heavily populated by Israeli settlement, much of which was supported by legally acquired Jewish title prior to 1948) with a reciprocal land swap in favour of the resultant Palestinian state. And of course, Israel has set a precedent by withdrawing 7,500 settlers, dismantling 21 settlements and its military from Gaza in 2005 (to be met with more violence from the Palestinians in Gaza in the form of rocket attacks on Israeli border towns).

In 2004, the Glasgow Media Group published a work by Greg Philo and Mike Berry entitled "Bad News From Israel " which was widely praised by Palestinian and Muslim groups and veteran Israel basher John Pilger (in the New Statesman 28 June 2004) praised its authors as "pioneers in their field" and insisted that "every journalist should read this book; every student of journalism ought to be assigned it" (it was also criticised as being flawed and containing "errors of fact and selectivity, and of adopting one narrative—that of the Palestinians—over the other" in Demokratiya).

The Glasgow Media Group contains in its opening pages a map of the borders agreed upon by the negotiating teams at Taba; borders which are generally accepted as the likely result of a negotiated settlement if one ever occurs. One thing is clear from this map (and remember the book was lauded by Palestinian and Muslim groups and their supporters) - the future borders of Israel and Palestine will not be "Swiss cheese" and are not even intended to create isolated cantons or a reality that would make it "impossible to build a Palestinian state."

The facts established by O'Loughlin article are also clear. Representatives of Israel's government speak of his people having to make "painful concessions" and that these will include the dismantling of settlements. But there is no talk of compromise, concessions or even an end to violence and incitement to hatred anywhere from the Palestinians who even raise the spectre of a "one state" solution which would result in disaster for both sides.

The suggestion that the settlement issue is a potential deal breaker in the context of peace talks between Israel and Palestine is predicated on a big lie and whitewashes the ongoing effects of Palestinian terrorism and the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise the right to self determination of the Jewish people in the State of Israel. As The Australian's Greg Sheridan put it today in Deep inside the plucky country:

"Of course the settlements and their future are endlessly debated in Israel, as is everything else. I left Israel profoundly optimistic about the morale of the society and the resolve of the people, but profoundly pessimistic about the peace process. If there were peace, any compromise on borders might be possible. But too many Arab leaders, and too many Palestinian leaders, are playing for the very long term and still believe that in time they will wipe Israel off the map."

Sheridan correctly concludes that "Israel will certainly make compromises. But it will not commit suicide."

Sadly, if the naysayers prevail, they will give the media and its journalists more scope and opportunity to write about the suffering of both sides. O'Loughlin will, as usual, write only about one of them.

Friday, January 18, 2008

The Australian newspaper continues to provide a balanced coverage of the events in the Middle East. Abraham Rabinovich’s report Hamas threat to Israel: captive may vanish stands in stark contrast to the misinformation published by its rival broadsheets Australia's main capital cities.

In his article, Rabinovich covers a number of items of news relating to the conflict betweeen Israel and the Palestinians. Which of the following would you expect to see covered in a report from the Melbourne Age or the Sydney Morning Herald?

# Threats by a senior Hamas official that captured Israeli soldier would come to harm if Israel did not halt its attacks on Gaza,

# The death of the son of former Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, the most militant of Hamas's political leaders who was one of 19 Palestinians killed in battles this week,

# A message of condolence was sent to Zahar by the Israeli soldier's father, Noam Shalit,

# Israel maintained air attacks and hit two vehicles, one of which killed two members of the Popular Resistance Committees involved in the making of rockets while the other unintentionally hit a civilian car, killing two (a PRC spokesman said the apparent target was its chief rocket maker, who was passing in a similar vehicle),

# Hamas fired close to 50 rockets into Israel yesterday, many of which hit the Israeli town of Sderot. "The town has had few casualties but most children and many adults are reported to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder",

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The Melbourne Age has borrowed from the London Telegraph (with the LA Times?) to bring its readers an interesting piece of analysis from Tim Butcher on the Bush Administration's efforts to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians Bloodshed shows up Bush Bid.

This is the same Tim Butcher who is responsible for the article - Israeli attack kills 18 Palestinians in Gaza in which he apes the lack of moral clarity of the Age Jerusalem Bureau chief in dismissing the value of non combatant Israeli lives by drawing equivalence between their murder by Palestinian terrorists with IDF action to protect its citizens against the terrorists ("militants if you like") who seek to kill them:-

"Fewer than a dozen Israelis have been killed by the rocket fire in recent years, while hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in reciprocal attacks.".

Palestinians have been firing quassam missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilian centres on a daily basis since before Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip more than two years. But Butcher absolves Hamas from any responsibility for the firing of these missiles since Hamas took over Gaza in last June's coup. This is what Butcher says:-.

"Israel blames Hamas for every rocket fired from Gaza, but the men firing them recently have belonged to other militant groups.

"That all changed on Tuesday when a salvo of at least 10 rockets was fired by Hamas militants in retaliation for the morning's bloodshed.

"It was the first fired by Hamas since last June's takeover of Gaza.".

Butcher is simply butchering the truth here.

Nothing changed on Tuesday. Cross border quassam attacks on Israeli civilians have in recent months been carried out in large numbers by all of the Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas. In many cases responsibility is not claimed but there is no doubt that Hamas is deeply involved in these attacks. Contrary to Butcher's statement that yesterday's rocket fire was the first "since last June's takeover", Hamas was claiming responsibility for such attacks in July - less than a month after the takeover - Hamas: Qassams were warning to aggressive Israeli 'enemy':-"Hamas claimed responsibility Friday for firing two Qassam rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip earlier in the day, for the first time since the militant group seized power in Gaza from Mahmoud Abbas' rival Fatah movement.".

How many times can you fire a slavo of missiles for the first time?.

Butcher has accepted the Hamas view "hook, line and sinker". He would have done us all (including himself) a favour had he conducted some basic research into the matter but that's not all - it gets worse.

By falling under the Hamas spell and accepting things from its warped perspective (and polls show only 19% of Palestinians do that these days), he is exposed for his lack of understanding of the responsibility of elected governments. To emphasize that Hamas has only now re-entered the missile firing game infers that it somehow had no prior responsibility for the attacks of other so called "militant groups" is an ugly piece of "analysis".

Acccording to international law, Hamas has had the responsibility to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians since it was elected in January 2006. It has done nothing of the sort. It has carried out attacks of its own and has continued to amass arms through smuggling across borders, often in humanitarian aid packages. Two such large caches of arms have been detected in the past fortnight. Butcher accepts that Hamas is well armed - how did it get that way?

Hamas continues to call for the destruction of Israel and will accept nothing less than the dismantling of the Jewish State. Unless Hamas dramatically changes its stated aims, it cannot be part of a negotiation process which has the attainment of peace between Israel and Palestine as its aim and it should be treated with contempt by the international community for cheating its own people of the opportunity for better lives.

No amount of misinformation from bad journalists is going to change that!

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Commentators on the Middle East peace process often mention that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has virtually no power base and wonder whether the current United States strategy of strengthening him through economic concessions will work to further the process.

Yaakov Kirschen, the creator of the Dry Bones cartoon points out that back in January of 1993 Israel "started negotiations with the PLO just as they began to lose their power base to Hamas" and that the above cartoon is still a "pertinent comment today about today's situation". Like many of us he feels like he's in the movie "Groundhog Day".

The above cartoon was first published almsot exactly 15 years ago on 22 January, 1993!

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Zvi Barel writes in Haaretz that "when the plane carrying U.S. President George W. Bush departs from glittering Dubai and lands in Riyadh, the substantive part of his visit to the Middle East will commence." - The Arabs should stop whining.

Barel raises some interesting items that have so far escaped the attention of most of the media in the west. He refers to an article by Egyptian intellectual and researcher, Mamoun Fandy "The Cards are in the Hands of the Arabs" which appeared in the daily Asharq Al-Awsat and which asks why Israel succeeds in promoting its narrative, arguing that it is alone in its desire for peace, while the Arabs want war?

"Perhaps the time has come for the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians, to take a serious view of Israel's strategic fears. The Israeli question about the nature of the Palestinian state is logical and legitimate. Will this state add to stability or instability in the region?"

Barel concludes by asking another question:

"How is it that the Arab states have still not recognized the existence of Israeli supporters of peace? Where is their Arab partner?"

He's unlikely to receive an answer to a question that is rarely posed in the right places in this region.

Monday, January 14, 2008

HonestReporting Canada notes that a report by Canwest Mideast correspondent Matthew Fisher which discussed President Bush’s whirlwind visit to the region was printed in last Tuesday’s edition of the Montreal Gazette and reported the following:

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have given President George W. Bush a welcome gift on the eve of his arrival in the Holy Land today. After sharp differences over the Palestinian Authority's failure to stop attacks on Israel…"

"The immense difficulty that peace negotiators have had for decades were underlined again early yesterday by the first Katyusha rocket attacks from Lebanon into northern Israel in several months and on Monday when a rocket fired from Gaza landed farther inside Israel than any before it."

To the naked eye, this report seems accurate but when comparing this article to other Canwest papers that featured Mr. Fisher’s report, one can’t help but notice a stark difference.

"... on Monday when a terrorist rocket fired from Gaza landed farther inside Israel than any before it."

HonestReporting Canada contacted editors at the Montreal Gazette questioning the editing of the term "terrorists" from the Gazette’s version and was fobbed off with the remark that "the Gazette is free to edit Canwest news service copy for reasons of style and space." This is despite the fact that the only word that suffered from the editing was "terrorist".

The Canadians have a point but the Montreal Gazette doesn't hold a candle to the Jerusalem Bureau chief of the Melbourne Age who not only manages to expunge the “terror” word from his reports but also the actions of the perpetrators of the terror. We're still waiting for word from him about the katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon into the Israeli town of Shlomi last week. No doubt he will give it as much space as he gives the daily rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sderot - zilch.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Canadian Muslims have brought a complaint against Ezra Levant before the Alberta Human Rights Commission claiming that the publication the Mohamed cartoons of exposes Muslims to hatred and contempt. Levant makes it clear exactly whose human rights really need protection and whose rights are being abused.

Here is the text of Levant's opening statement from his "interrogation" (Kangaroo court).

Alberta Human Rights Commission Interrogation

Opening remarks by Ezra Levant, January 11, 2008 – Calgary

My name is Ezra Levant. Before this government interrogation begins, I will make a statement.

When the Western Standard magazine printed the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago, I was the publisher. It was the proudest moment of my public life. I would do it again today. In fact, I did do it again today. Though the Western Standard, sadly, no longer publishes a print edition, I posted the cartoons this morning on my website, ezralevant.co

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. So I will now call those bureaucrats “the commission” or “the hrc”, since to call the commission a “human rights commission” is to destroy the meaning of those words.

I believe that this commission has no proper authority over me. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason they were discriminated against. The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not words or ideas. Now the commission, which is funded by a secular government, from the pockets of taxpayers of all backgrounds, is taking it upon itself to be an enforcer of the views of radical Islam. So much for the separation of mosque and state.

I have read the past few years’ worth of decisions from this commission, and it is clear that it has become a dump for the junk that gets rejected from the real legal system. I read one case where a male hair salon student complained that he was called a “loser” by the girls in the class. The commission actually had a hearing about this. Another case was a kitchen manager with Hepatitis-C, who complained that it was against her rights to be fired. The commission actually agreed with her, and forced the restaurant to pay her $4,900. In other words, the commission is a joke – it’s the Alberta equivalent of a U.S. television pseudo-court like Judge Judy – except that Judge Judy actually was a judge, whereas none of the commission’s panellists are judges, and some aren’t even lawyers. And, unlike the commission, Judge Judy believes in freedom of speech.

It’s bad enough that this sick joke is being wreaked on hair salons and restaurants. But it’s even worse now that the commissions are attacking free speech. That’s my first point: the commissions have leapt out of the small cage they were confined to, and are now attacking our fundamental freedoms. As Alan Borovoy, Canada’s leading civil libertarian, a man who helped form these commissions in the 60’s and 70’s, wrote, in specific reference to our magazine, being a censor is, quote, “hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions. There should be no question of the right to publish the impugned cartoons.” Unquote.

Since the commission is so obviously out of control, he said quote “It would be best, therefore, to change the provisions of the Human Rights Act to remove any such ambiguities of interpretation.” Unquote.

The commission has no legal authority to act as censor. It is not in their statutory authority. They’re just making it up – even Alan Borovoy says so.

But even if the commissions had some statutory fig leaf for their attempts at political and religious censorship, it would still be unlawful and unconstitutional.

We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada.

That common law has been restated in various fundamental documents, especially since the Second World War.

In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Canada is a party, declared that, quote:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights guaranteed, quote

1. “ human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely,(c) freedom of religion; (d) freedom of speech; (e) freedom of assembly and association; and (f) freedom of the press.In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed, quote:2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:a) freedom of conscience and religion;b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

Those were even called “fundamental freedoms” – to give them extra importance.

For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values.

It is also deeply procedurally one-sided and unjust. The complainant – in this case, a radical Muslim imam, who was trained at an officially anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, and who has called for sharia law to govern Canada – doesn’t have to pay a penny; Alberta taxpayers pay for the prosecution of the complaint against me. The victims of the complaints, like the Western Standard, have to pay for their own lawyers from their own pockets. Even if we win, we lose – the process has become the punishment. (At this point, I’d like to thank the magazine’s many donors who have given their own money to help us fight against the Saudi imam and his enablers in the Alberta government.)

It is procedurally unfair. Unlike real courts, there is no way to apply for a dismissal of nuisance lawsuits. Common law rules of evidence don’t apply. Rules of court don’t apply. It is a system that is part Kafka, and part Stalin. Even this interrogation today – at which I appear under duress – saw the commission tell me who I could or could not bring with me as my counsel and advisors.

I have no faith in this farcical commission. But I do have faith in the justice and good sense of my fellow Albertans and Canadians. I believe that the better they understand this case, the more shocked they will be. I am here under your compulsion to answer the commission’s questions. But it is not I who am on trial: it is the freedom of all Canadians.

You may start your interrogation.

The bureacrat given the task of carrying out the interrogation is no match for Levant who unmasks the stupidity of the process when he answers the claim that Muslims are exposed to hatred and contempt by the publication of the Danish cartoons.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

It's Almost Supernatural reports that "detractors of Israel will be shocked to learn that another 3 Black South African soccer players could soon be playing for local Israeli teams" in Why the South African Soccer Exodus to “Apartheid” Israel? The story adds more proof to the fact that the ugly canard that Israel is an Apartheid state is a blatant lie put out by the Israel bashing lobby.

"Anyone who has followed Israel’s attempts to qualify for major international tournaments will no doubt know how much they rely on the key Israeli-Arab duo of Abbas Suan and Walid Badir.

It should be clear to all that the Middle East conflict is not a racial one as some would have us believe. It is a dispute between 2 nations over the same tiny piece of land.

Steve adds: The real racism when it comes to Israeli football is that Israel is forced to qualify for the FIFA World Cup via difficult European groups because Arab nations refuse to accept them into their legitimate (and much easier) geographical (Arab) region."

Friday, January 11, 2008

According to its website, the Oxford Union "is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford." The Union "was founded in 1823 as a forum for discussion and debate, at a time when the free exchange of ideas was a notion foreign to the restrictive University authorities."

The speakers in favour are Norman Finkelstein and Prof Ted Honderich while those against are Ghada Karmi and Ilan Pappe. Solomonia provides a resume of each of the speakers - each of them an anti-Semite of the lowest order - and a correspondent sums it all up perfectly:-

"This is the academic equivalent of a freak show, an exhibition of intellectual rarities, 'academic freaks" — such as unusually mediocre, lazy, self-indulgent, angry and frustrated humans, "thinkers" with humongous chips on their shoulders for their failure to be recognized for their gigantic intellects,and whose performance is expected to shock the viewers.

Discerning and decent people do not put up a freak show and do not go to see one".

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Notorious Holocaust minimiser, Norman Finkelstein, who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, has met Hizbullah's commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in his office in the coastal city of Tyre - U.S. academic Finkelstein meets top Hezbollah official in Lebanon. He joins another Israel bashing Jewish born person Noam Chomsky in cosying up to the Islamist terror organisation which specifically targetted Jews when it attacked Israeli civilian areas during the Second Lebanon War.

Finkelstein told reporters:

"After the horror and after the shame and after the anger there still remain a hope, and I know that I can get in a lot of trouble for what I am about to say, but I think that the Hezbollah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland."

Finkelstein is either oblivious to or supports the views of Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah who stated in a 2002 interview with Lebanon’s Daily Star,

"If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world wide."

That means Chomsky, Finkelstein and their pale imitations like Aussie wannabe Antony Loewenstein who was at his acolytic best with this - Going with Hezbollah (they're like his, um ... footy team) and his mainly ignorant worst in the rest of his execrable blog.

Finkelstein and co would do well to bone up on their history and in particular, of those Jews who like them acted as apologists for fascists in an earlier war only to discover that making nice to mass murderers doesn't help you very much. Of course, Chomsky discovered this three decades ago when he decided to be chummy with the Pol Pot regime and has been grubbily devoting a great deal of time and energy to consigning that part of his past into the blank pages.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Christmas is usually a time to celebrate the arrival of Christians in the Holy Land. But this year, as Patriarch Michel Sabbah of the Latin Rite Catholic Church revealed during his Christmas sermon in Bethlehem , local leaders are currently concerned with the opposite phenomenon: exodus. Speaking to the legions of Arab Christians fleeing the region, Sabbah said, "I say to you what Jesus told us: do not be afraid."But there's reason to be.

Last year, dozens of Christians were slain in Iraq and a Syriac Orthodox priest was beheaded in Mosul. Two prominent Christian Palestinians were recently killed in Gaza.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

It seems that everything associated with Middle East diplomacy these days can be categorised by the description "lame duck".

US President George Bush who lands in Tel Aviv tomorrow in the hope of reviving the peace process he launched at Annapolis in November is in the final year of his presidency and is therefore surely a "lame duck"?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert isn't very popular with his own constituents and is considered a "lame duck". His PA counterpart Mahmoud Abbas is so weak that he can barely raise a quack and that's not taking into account allegations of collaboration he faces from more hard-line elements of his own and rival parties. Meanwhile, the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip is pretty much ineffectual apart from its capacity to intimidate journalists, rival Fatah party members and the local Christian community so it's pretty much a dead duck.

With all of these dying, injured and dyslectic ducks in the neighbourhood, who else by but the rubbery ducky of them all, Ed O'Loughlin, a lame duck journalist if there ever was one as he sees out his seemingly never-ending last days at the Fairfax Jerusalem Bureau, to put his usual spin on the Bush visit?

He does this brilliantly today with Bush flies to rescue Mid-East peace mission in which he provides an opinion piece which excoriates and misrepresents Israeli policies, highlights Palestinian demands for concessions and rewrites the entire peace process by dismissing Palestinian terrorism and incitement off the agenda altogether. It's an old trick and we're tired of it but it's the best that a lame duck journalist can do.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Associated Press Writer Ibrahim Barzak always puts an interesting spin on the pieces that he writes. In Israeli fuel cuts force Gaza blackouts he opens with news of a warning by Gaza's top energy official that "Gazans will be forced to live without lights and electric heaters for eight hours a day because Israel has cut fuel supplies to the territory's only electric plant in half." Of course, the real reason why this may happen is because the Hamas controlled leadership in Gaza is doing nothing to prevent daily rocket attacks on southern Israel. That's the real message behind the cutbacks.

Still, Barzak's effort is somewhat more illuminating that those of Fairfax resident Gaza person Ed O'Loughlin. I came across this recent piece in the Brisbane Times from him - Transport grinding to a halt under Israeli siege. The Times has such a miniscule readership that there seems to be no demand for it with newsagents on both the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast which are situated less than 100 kilometres from the Queensland capital. It is however, apparently part of the Fairfax stable so he was permitted to make an ass of himself to a small cross section of Brisbanites whose fish and chips come wrapped in the hard to find newspaper.

Sunday, January 06, 2008

The fact that Sigmund Freud, known as "the father of psychoanalysis", was born Jewish should alone have ensured that Jews would become excellent subjects for students of his theories. Take the latest scandal from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University where a graduate student has won an award for a thesis which concludes that the lack of any incidence of rape of Palestinian women by members of the Israeli Defence Forces is conclusive proof that Zionists are racist.

Seriously, a panel of professors at the Hebrew University headed by a Dr. Zali Gurevitch recommended the publication of this rubbish by the University's Shaine Center and presented its author, who reached her conclusions based on a study of 25 members of the IDF, with an award for her efforts.

Tal Nitzan's theme is that the "lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose". She rules out the possibility that the Jewish soldiers might behave ethically towards Palestinian women or that they are somewhat more civilized than those who fight in other places. No, she argues that they simply suppress their sexual desires for Palestinian women and that makes them racist.

Gurevitch and Nitzan have overlooked another possible explanation that underpins this absurd scenario; that the problem lies with them and a small group of like minded extreme left leaning academics. Perhaps, it is they who are suppressing their own feelings of guilt manifested by their own inadequacies (and if Freud is correct, this could apply to their own sexual inadequacies as well)? If that is true then why can they not come up with a plethora of fanciful theories based upon totally false premises if the end game serves their own political purposes?

"Pappé has long acknowledged that he is not objective and cares little about factual accuracy. He readily admits that ideology drives his historical writings and statements. And his ideology can be simply summed up: Israel is illegitimate and should be the target of international sanctions until it is dismantled as a Jewish state."

The same approach renders it possible for Tal Nitzan to come up with her own absurd theory based on an ideological driven lie but composed by her perhaps because of a need to become her mother so that she can control her father and the 25 soldiers who served as her guinea pigs for the purposes of her study. You need not take too many steps further and suddenly, a once serious institution like the Hebrew University is enabled not only to accept this drivel but to laud it as a product of legitimate scholarship.

And drivel it surely is as Makor Rishon editor Amnon Lord, who first publicized the story, points out:

"It is noteworthy that Palestinian propaganda around the world frequently accuses Israelis of murder and rape. Such that this situation is unique: An army is found blameworthy of rape, and is also blameworthy of not raping."

The stupidity of it all is brought further into focus with Gurevitch's comment "that the right-wing should not jump to the conclusion that this was simply another 'secular, left-wing' generality."

What absolute bunkum!

This is not about right-wing, secular or left-wing. It's not even about the unconscious, dream symbolism, penis envy, the Oedipus complex or Freudian slips for that matter. It's all about truth and honesty in scholarship and ultimately it's about whether Gurevitch and co or the rest of us belong in the cuckoo's nest.